Google improves the offline translation capabilities of its Translate application for iOS and Android by injecting artificial intelligence

Owning an application that performs translations can be very useful in a foreign country. When it becomes more able to provide the best possible results, we can only better decipher the message on a billboard or be understood by its interlocutors. Google Translate from the Mountain View firm is now positioned at the second level and guess what? In offline mode.

Google announces the introduction of a technology called NMT to the offline version of its Translate application for iOS and Android. NMT - rendered in French by neuronal translation engine - it is artificial intelligence now integrated into Google Translate. Unlike previous systems in which the sentences to be translated were cut into sentences they are analyzed as a whole in the case of NMT. According to the Mountain View firm, the maneuver helps to broaden the understanding of the context in which the translation is to be performed.

As a backdrop, each word is vectorized over several hundred dimensions to highlight its characteristics in both languages. Each vector represents the genre, the register, the grammatical category ... Each of these is then encoded into another vector that represents the word in the context of the sentence. The resulting matrix is ​​exploited with the help of previously translated words to structure the sentence. The visual result is indicative of differences in translation quality between the PBMT system and NMT.

NMT arrives on the offline version of Google Translator for iOS and Android two years after its introduction in the accessible version with an Internet connection. The neural translation engine accompanies each of the 59 languages ​​available at the moment. To use it, simply download the required package through the application interface.
In the circle of automated translators boosted to artificial intelligence Google is not alone. The announcement of the firm Mountain View is indeed following that of Microsoft. Like Google, the Redmond company has announced the integration of a neural translation engine to its cloud offer in 2016. In late 2017, we saw the insertion of NMT technology to Microsoft Translator for devices equipped with a chip dedicated to artificial intelligence. Thanks to the improvements made in the calculation algorithms, the engine is available (since April 2018) as a download pack for any device without a chip dedicated to the AI.

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